The cat has long been a standard animal for anatomical and acute physiological studies of muscle function and motor control at the spinal cord level. In this project, a wide variety of traditional and novel kinesiological techniques are being used to study motor tasks in unanesthetized, normally behaving cats, including computer-aided reconstruction of skeletal movement from videotapes, multiaxis force plates, chronically implanted nerve cuff and EMG electrodes, and strain and length transducers. The major focus has been the study of hindlimb muscles and their afferent and efferent control during walking. Other hindlimb movements studied include jumping, paw shaking, scratching, and reflexes to cutaneous nerve stimulation during normal and decerebrate walking. In a collaborative study, similar data are being collected from a large number of neck muscles. The major objective is to correlate patterns of usage with the complex mechanics and compartmenalization and proprioceptive specializations of these muscles. A major theme emerging from these experiments is a concept of """"""""Task Groups,"""""""" which denotes the segregation and specialization of sensorimotor systems to perform kinematically homogenous tasks in an optimal manner. This is particularly apparent in multiarticular muscles, which in some cases use independent subdivisions of their alpha motoneuron pool to accomplish kinematically diverse tasks.
